[alabastervlog]

Despite heading in more and more romantic directions in my thinking—from a very-analytic start—I don't find the core problem with Rand's thinking to be primacy of reason, but sloppy (or, motivated—it can be hard to tell which) reasoning that leads to ultra-confident conclusions. A consistent pattern is you'll see a whole big edifice of reasoning out of her, but peppered about in it, and usually including right at the beginning, are these little bits that the cautious reader may notice and go "wait, that... doesn't necessarily follow" or (VERY often) "hold on, you're sneaking in a semantic argument there and it's not per se convincing at all, on second thought" and then those issues are just never addressed, she just keeps trucking along, so most of the individual steps might be fine but there are all these weird holes in it, so none of it really holds together.

I've even, after complaints about this were met with "you just didn't start with her fundamentals, so you didn't understand", reluctantly gone all the way to her big work on epistemology(!) and... sure enough, same.

I find similar things in basically anything hosted on the Austrian-school beloved site mises.org. IDK if this is just, like, the house style of right wing laissez faire or what.

[kbelder]

I don't think it has anything to do with being right wing -- Rand despised and was despised by much of the right wing -- but more to do with her traditionalist method of doing philosophy. I'd even call it Russian-influenced. I think Rand approached her philosophy from a literary perspective, and viewed her philosophy as a grand treatise that addressed every important aspect... an entire philosophical system. The overbearing rigidity and confidence sprung from this. It is very 19th-century in feel.

It is very different from a modern, more scientific approach, where we would view the system as a work in progress which would be refined over time. It would have been better for Rand to say about (for instance) free will, "it may function this way" or "we can make at least these statements about it", but I think Rand was not constitutionally able to couch her beliefs with qualifiers. It hurt her philosophical arguments, while at the same time perhaps made her a more interesting author.

I'm not an Objectivist, despite being sympathetic, because Rand created it and wouldn't agree that I was one. The reason is because I would tweak her philosophy. I'd incorporate some Bayesian probabilistic arguments into her metaphysics and epistemology, which she would despise. I'd modify her ethics with findings from game theory. I'd fold insights from cellular automata and chaos theory into her philosophy of consciousness. The broad swaths would be mostly the same, but it would no longer by Ayn Rand's Objectivism (tm).